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Like Michael Jordan with the Wizards and Brett Favre six times, many people that left at the peak of their powers feel the urge to come back to prove they’ve still got it. Maybe it’s the tedium of sitting on the same island and the same yachts every day, or maybe it’s the frustration in seeing young guns taking what used to be yours. We here at NSD can’t get in the minds of the greats, but lucky for us, the pre-eminent guest writer of NSD, MemoFromTurner, felt the itch both creatively and physically (Quote: “I thought Lifestyles were the best out there!) and is back with two more Cuts O’ Beef, this time touching on the superficially classy and hipsters. Enjoy.

Our next Cut O’ Beef is the Beef Tartare. Beef Tartare is superficially a classy, pricey Cut—found almost exclusively at swanky restaurants as a heavily garnished appetizer. Cut through all the fanfare, however, and you’re still left with a piece of raw Beef, albeit one of generally high quality. Beef Tartares may come dressed to the nines, well made-up and heavily perfumed but deep down they are just selling pure, raw sex appeal. Beef Tartares can be found in 4-star hotel lobby bars in revealing cocktail dresses, sipping vodka sodas and eyeing down every investment banker that comes through the door. A Beef Tartare is totally unafraid of maintaining eye contact, giving the undeniable impression that she knows that you know that she knows that you are giving her looks from across the bar (and she loves it). Ever notice how most Cuts get self-conscious when trying out a tight, short skirt on NSD, constantly fidgeting and smoothing down the material because they are worried about showing too much? Beef Tartares don’t have that problem. Like every encounter with raw meat it’s useful to have a touch of skepticism and paranoia about the origin and history of a Beef Tartare—you don’t want to end up the victim of a late-night shakedown by Guido the Pimp. Even legitimate dealings with this Cut are of a largely transactional nature and the resulting lack of trustworthiness has ruined many a NSD aficionado (see: Marion “Bitch Set Me Up” Barry, Eliot Spitzer, Mark Sanford, Bill Clinton, etc., etc., etc.,). Seriously, read Ashley Dupre’s Wikipedia page (Educate yo’ self) and tell me you don’t know 10 girls that grew up exactly like her. Don’t be afraid to indulge, NSD readers, but watch your back.

Our next Cut O’ Beef is the Tenderloin. A Cut of middling quality and, despite the name, not all that tender, Tenderloins must be marinated, drizzled in sauce, served in a salad, or otherwise dressed up with all kinds of stupid shit to be edible. Similarly misnamed (Guess what? You’re not that fucking hip.) and of questionable quality, Tenderloins are hipster chicks. Tenderloins have convinced themselves that buying mass market individuality (American Apparel shapeless dress? Check. Ray-Ban Wayfarers? Check. Faux-vintage boots? Check.) will land them the indie rocker of their dreams. Sorry Tenderloins, Win Butler doesn’t give a fuck about you (see theme song above). Though they pretend to wear their hearts on their sleeves, rock stars are really just trying to get laid like the rest of us and their lifestyle affords them access to Cuts far above your average Tenderloin. Chris Martin married Gwyneth Paltrow. That idiot from Good Charlotte (Remember “Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous”? What happened to that?) married Nicole Richie. Even the hipster-Royal Wedding pairing of Ben Gibbard and Zooey Deschanel is an inflated princess fantasy (Kate Middleton was not a poor commoner; she is a millionaire’s daughter educated at elite private schools. Zooey Deschanel did not work double-shifts as a coffeeshop barista and bartender; she is an A-list Hollywood actress and the great-granddaughter of a French president). I hate to be the one to break it to you Tenderloins, but as soon as your boyfriend lands that record deal and moves out of his parents’ basement he’s going to be moving on to bigger and better things.

Where does that leave us as NSD connoisseurs? Personally, if I wanted my women to have no ass/tits, skinny jeans and a page-boy haircut I would drop the fucking pretense and just be gay (Note: MemoFromTurner and the NSD team in general are fully supportive of the gay community. As a heterosexual male, I am attracted to women that actually look like women. If I were a homosexual male, I assume that I would be attracted to men that actually look like men. To me, this whole androgyny trend really manifests itself as asexuality. Girls that look like pubescent boys are not sexy; in fact, it’s a little creepy to see a Tenderloin from afar and not know if it’s a guy or a girl until you get close.). Tenderloins shit on the very spirit of NSD. Neo-feminist rhetoric tells this Cut that wearing a skirt on NSD is a betrayal of their moral principles (First Commandment: Thou shall abstain from any dress or behavior that makes oneself physically attractive to men). In this humble author’s opinion, feminists have subverted and poisoned the very idea of femininity. Despite adopting what could possibly be construed as a slightly misogynistic tone in this blog (we’re working on it), at its heart the NSD ethos is a celebration of the feminine. National Skirt Day is a deeply hormonal experience, in the birds-and-the-bees sense of the term. NSD is commonly misunderstood as a day for Peeping Tom-style creeping. In reality it is a day to both see and to be seen, a marketplace to judge sexual viability and to be judged ourselves. If our response to such an outpouring of pheromones and fertility comes across as a little crude, I hope that our female readers will excuse it as a little howling-at-the-moon virility on our part. In fact, I’d like to use this opportunity to extend an invitation (and challenge) to any girl out there that would like to contribute to this blog as a guest writer. I’d love to get a view on NSD from a female perspective, as well as hearing about some of the more idiotic moves that guys try to pull.

Getting back to the point, let me reiterate that Tenderloins shit on the very spirit of NSD, going on strike against the chauvinist pigs by refusing to participate in mainstream culture by wearing a skirt on that bright spring morning. On the other hand, they might just be afraid to enter their pale, untoned legs, PBR-fattened asses and unwaxed bikini lines into the genetic lottery with the rest of the female race. As you can probably tell at this point, I firmly believe that there is a special ring of hell reserved for those that protest NSD on feminist grounds. In all honesty, I’ve made a bunch of sweeping generalizations in this post, not to mention awkwardly lumping together the hipster and feminist sub-Cuts, and I think we can all agree that the hipster/Tenderloin connection is not one of my stronger Meat Metaphors (Get it? It’s because they both contain words that don’t describe them! It’s a contradiction-in-terms! It’s a paradox!) but I really just wanted to use this Cut O’ Beef Index post to warn NSD readers to be ever-vigilant about the creeping forces that seek to destroy our Movement. No one gets as big as National Skirt Day is bound to be without making a few enemies along the way. So if you ever find yourself at the receiving end of a long tirade at a party because some frumpy girl with thick-framed, over-sized glasses overheard you tell your buddy that the new girl at work “has got some tits on her”, remember to spit some lines about your truly deep appreciation of womanhood as you pull your foot from your mouth. Or, as NSD Hall of Famer Kenny Powers put it, “They say Kenny Powers is a woman-hater. That’s not true. I love women, every fucking one of them. Even the fat-as-shit ones.”